Speak now or forever hold your piece

listening to…..

Punk & Poetry by The King Blues (punk, ska, love songs and agitprop)

reading….

The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe (I finished reading American Gods recently and thought ‘God thats a lot like Soldiers in the Mist’ turns out Gaiman is Wolfes biggest fan)

Little known fact GW is one of the engineers who designed the Pringles making machine.

trying out…..

Protobufs
Hadoop
Different linux desktops (and despite self quite liking Gnome 3)

thinking about buying…..

a Raspberry Pi

I have been watching the fallout from the MS Windows 8 demo with some quiet amusement

Windows 8 HTML Javascript panic

With some fairly apocalyptic articles about Silverlight and even .Net being dropped.

Spreading FUD amongst your opponents is one thing, but amongst your supporters is going some.

It’s interesting to see the amount of distrust the Microsoft is held in, even by it’s developer community.

Mind you in the brave new post-Sun Java world, it’s probably something that us Java devs should get used to as well…..

Here is a very interesting article on migrating to Scala from Java, not only on the technical gotcha’s (readability, null handling and what parts of Scala functionality they avoided), but also in the route they took in getting general acceptance of the new language within the organisation.

InfoQ Guadian Scala

BTW I have read the Odersky book they mention, and it is very good.

More proof, if any was needed, that Nokia has obviously backed a winner this time

Just seen this video review and started giggling like a complete loon in the middle of the office… not cool.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2757-DC-Universe-Online

Not seen much of DCU, though by rep it seems to be more of a 3rd person shooter style (http://hill-kleerup.org/blog/heroes/2011/02/because-occasionally-i-feel-like-i-should-post-something-other-than-tweets.html)

What with Champions Online having to hit the “free-play” button to get players, it looks like CoX is going to be last superhero MMO standing.

Some of the new CoH stuff is also rather top notch, I just recently picked up Going Rogue, and haven’t played a Preatorian yet, but managed to get Shadow Hood through his first Morality Mission (v good mish, and he is now a Vigilante) and started the arc to open up Ramblin Syd’s Alpha Slot (which somewhat surprisingly does not involve trips to Old Compton Street, or cruising Hampstead Heath at 3am in the morning….go figure).

BTW the Alpha Slot is the post-50 uber-god-mode stuff added in I19.

Also as all the Fitness Pool is now inherent, respeccing your old toons becomes rather fun, and (although I haven’t tried it yet) will get over the 14-20 slog to get Stamina.

..albeit in a cynical, barking kind of way ..  Nokia Plans A .. 9

The best being Plan R

Normally Mr Monbiot writes quite a a bit of self satisfied eco-tosh, but occasionally some articles hit the mark, and tax city heist of the century is one of them

Microsoft shafts Nokia

I’m still using (and loving) my N900 after suffering 2 consecutive HTC WinMo phone. I was quite looking forward to the Meego phone, but I’m not going to buy into another dead end.

I’ll stick with my Nokia until the contract expires then see, maybe WebOS maybe Android but definately not Nokia…..

Sad

So farewell Anne Francis
Off for a reunion with Leslie Neilson
I remember you being quite hot in Forbidden Planet
Even though your old enough to be my Grandma now

So Farewell Gerry Rafferty
No more will you wind your way down to Baker Street
Or be stuck in the middle with anyone
Derr Da Da Da Da Duddle Daaaaaa
That was yours.